John Steinbeck
1) East of Eden
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English
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Classics - St. Charles Public Library
Coming-of-age
Eisenhower Public Library Staff Picks: Literary Fiction
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Coming-of-age
Eisenhower Public Library Staff Picks: Literary Fiction
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Description
This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks and the Hamiltons--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
2) The pearl
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English
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"For the diver Kino, finding a magnificent pearl means the promise of better life for his impoverished family. His dream blinds him to the greed and suspicions the pearl arouses in him and his neighbors, and even his loving wife cannot temper his obsession or stem the events leading to tragedy. Kino and his wife illustrate the fall from innocence of people who believe that wealth erases all problems"--P. [4] of cover.
3) Cannery row
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English
Description
Unburdened by the material necessities of the more fortunate, the denizens of Cannery Row discover rewards unknown in more traditional society. Henry the painter sorts through junk lots for pieces of wood to incorporate into the boat he is building, while the girls from Dora Flood's bordello venture out now and then to enjoy a bit of sunshine. Lee Chong stocks his grocery with almost anything a man could want, and Doc, a young marine biologist who...
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Thirty-five years ago, when "searching for America" was not yet the cliche it has since become, Steinbeck hit the highways with his French poodle, Charley. In a custom-built camper he named Rosinante after Don Quixote's steed, the two traveled the country--10,000 miles and 34 states. Their varied experiences comprise several slices of small-town, back-roads Americana. Steinbeck laments the rise of plastic-covered everything, the vacuousness of "sad...
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"From a swashbuckling pirate fantasy to a meditation on American morality-- two classic Steinbeck novels make their black spine debuts. In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with 'The Winter of Our Discontent, ' he had "resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American." Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of the novel,...
7) The red pony
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English
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Description
Tells the story of a young boy and life on his father's ranch.
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English
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Each working day from January 29 to November 1, 1951, John Steinbeck warmed up to the work of writing East of Eden with a letter to the late Pascal Covici, his friend and editor at The Viking Press. It was his way, he said, of "getting my mental arm in shape to pitch a good game."
Steinbeck's letters were written on the left-hand pages of a notebook in which the facing pages would be filled with the test of East of Eden.
...13) Of mice and men
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English
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In depression-era California, two migrant workers dream of better days on a spread of their own until an act of unintentional violence leads to tragic consequences.
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The first book John Steinbeck read as a child was the Caxton Morte d'Arthur, and he considered it one of the most challenging tasks of his career to modernize the stories of King Arthur. "These stories are alive even in those of us who have not read them, " he says. "And, in our day, we are perhaps impatient with the words and the stately rhythms of [Thomas] Malory. I wanted to set the stories down in meaning as they were written, leaving out nothing...
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In his only work of political satire, The Short Reign of Pippin IV, John Steinbeck turns the French Revolution upside down as amateur astronomer Pippin Héristal is drafted to rule the unruly French. Steinbeck creates around the infamous Pippin the most hilarious royal court ever: Pippins wife, Queen Marie, who might have taken her place at the bar of a very good restaurant; his uncle, a man of dubious virtue; his glamour-struck daughter and her beau,...
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Set in the 1930's, this is the story of Elisa who raises chrysanthemums and yearns for a more meaningful outlet for her strength and latent abilities. Her encounter with an itinerant tinker, at first, brings confidence in herself, but soon that confidence is replaced by overwhelming defeat.
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A Penguin Classic
In Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck’s beautifully rendered depictions of small yet fateful moments that transform ordinary lives, these twelve early stories introduce both the subject and style of artistic expression that recur in the most important works of his career. Each of these self-contained stories is linked to the others by the presence of the Munroes, a family whose misguided behavior and lack of sensitivity...
In Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck’s beautifully rendered depictions of small yet fateful moments that transform ordinary lives, these twelve early stories introduce both the subject and style of artistic expression that recur in the most important works of his career. Each of these self-contained stories is linked to the others by the presence of the Munroes, a family whose misguided behavior and lack of sensitivity...
20) The wayward bus
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English
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"Chronicle of a bus traveling California's back roads, transporting the lost and the lonely, the good and the greedy, the stupid and the scheming, the beautiful and the vicious away from their shattered dreams and, possibly, toward the promise of the future." -- Back cover.